Weekly Roundup 9/5/14 – Recharging Batteries: It’s good to go to conferences, even for editors

Conferences can be so energizing. There’s just something about all that collective vision in one place.

And in the world of poverty alleviation, frequent energy recharging is necessary. Probably vital.

Day to day, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the many obstacles that stand in the way of needed change at the base of the pyramid. It’s downright daunting.

But if you get a bunch of like-minded people together in the casual setting of a conference sharing success stories and anecdotes from the field, the ?feeling that it’s possible to change the world returns once again, as if by magic.

That re-energizing theory certainly holds true here at NextBillion.

We spend a lot of time interacting electronically with people involved in the development-through-enterprise community, gathering their stories and best practices and hopefully helping clear the path to change.

But our mission becomes clearer, our resolution firmer, when we get to talk to people face to face and see the commitment in their eyes.

So this was a battery-charging week at NextBillion, because two of the biggest conferences associated with poverty alleviation were being staged, and a couple of our editors were in attendance.

Scott Anderson, managing editor, was at SOCAP14, the social capital markets conference in San Francisco. James Militzer, NextBillion Financial Innovation editor, attended the 17th Microcredit Summit in Mexico.

We hope you’ll notice, by the stories listed below, that they didn’t spend all their time hanging in the hospitality lounge. They worked hard to relate what was happening at their respective events. And an amazing amount of things were happening. Take a few minutes and click on the stories listed below; the can-do spirit of some of the conference attendees just might ease your mind about the future of our planet.

In their downtime, though, our representatives did get a chance to mingle with old friends and make new ones. NextBillion will be better for what they saw, what they heard and the contacts they made. (Check back here regularly and hold us accountable for that statement.)

And if you attended one of the conferences, we’d love to hear about your learnings and experiences. Are you energized? Did you stumble upon any profound truths? Any unexpected, usable tidbits? Let NextBillion’s readers hear about it. After all, we don’t have to wait for the next conference to share with each other.